Founding-Era Translations of the Progress Clause

Before its ratification, the U.S. Constitution was translated for the German- and Dutch-speaking populations of Pennsylvania and New York, but little attention has been paid to these translations until now. In Founding-Era Translations of the United States Constitution, Christina Mulligan, Michael Douma, Hans Lind, and Brian Quinn analyze how these translations might aid interpretation of the Constitution today.

Student Writing Competitions

Guest post by Professor Michael Risch (Villanova University).

I’d like to thank Lisa and Camilla for the opportunity to write a short guest post. Ostensibly, this post is about the importance of writing competitions. If you are a professor, encourage your students to take part! If you are a student, don’t be afraid to submit your work. The advantages can include money, publication, and—at the very least—the satisfaction of working toward a scholarly goal.

Lemley & Miller: Judges Who Sit by Designation Less Likely To Be Reversed by Fed. Cir.

I'm thrilled to be here! Lisa’s list of non-faculty presenters at IPSC prompted me to check out a nifty new paper by Mark Lemley and Shawn Miller, demonstrating that the Federal Circuit reverses claim constructions far less frequently when the district judge below previously sat by designation in a claim construction appeal.

Introducing New Blogger: Maggie Wittlin

I am thrilled to welcome Maggie Wittlin as a new Written Description blogger. After graduating from Yale Law School, Maggie clerked on the District of Connecticut and Second Circuit and worked at Patterson Belknap, where she focused on patent litigation. She just started as an Associate in Law at Columbia Law School. Her research focuses on judge and juror decisionmaking as well as law and psychology/behavioral sciences, including attempts to explain affinity and antipathy toward patents. I look forward to reading her thoughts on new IP scholarship that catches her eye!

Non-Faculty Presenters at IPSC

The annual IP Scholars Conference is this week at Berkeley, and it includes over 150 presenters and up to six parallel tracks of presentations. The conference includes talks by Chief Judge Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit, Shira Perlmutter of the PTO, and Colleen Chien of the OSTP, as well as an impressive array of academics. But one of the goals of this blog is to highlight the work of less "famous" scholars, so here are some of the works by non-faculty presenters that I noticed (check the speaker list for links to their full abstracts or papers):

10 Tweets on Recent IP Scholarship

For blog readers who aren't on Twitter, here are 10 recent Tweets on IP-related scholarship that caught my eye. As I transition from clerking back to full-time academia, I'm debating the extent to which I will go back to writing longer posts about recent articles; feel free to email me (ouellette@law.stanford.edu) with comments.

Top 32 Experienced IP Scholars by (m)-index

After Dan Burk calculated the top IP scholars by h-index using Scholarometer, several scholars suggested to him that it would be interesting to normalize the results by seniority (because the h-index has a known seniority bias). Some bibliometricians have done this by using the m-index: the h-index over the years since the first publication. Because many legal scholars publish an early law review note well before beginning their academic careers in earnest, Burk decided to use a modified m-index: the h-index over the years in full-time law teaching.

Robert Cooter: "Growth Economics" and Intellectual Property Rights

I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in the George Mason University School of Law's Law and Economics Center's (LEC) Economics Institute for Law Professors for two weeks in Steamboat, Colorado, along with fellow IP scholars Sharon Sandeen, Amy Landers, Crystal Sheppard, and Ryan Holte. It was a special treat to hear Berkeley Law's Robert Cooter talk about how law and economics can be applied to intellectual property law. Cooter presented his new book, The Falcon's Gyre: Legal Foundations of Economic Innovation and Growth (2013) (w/ Aaron Edlin), which I'll discuss in this post.

Love Surveys University Researchers on Patenting

While there have been extensive debates about patenting federally funded research under the Bayh-Dole Act, there is little evidence about what the researchers themselves think of this regime. Professor Brian Love (Santa Clara Law) has tackled this problem with a survey of electrical engineering and computer science professors, and he describes the results in Do University Patents Pay Off? Evidence from a Survey of University Inventors in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (forthcoming Yale J.L. & Tech.). Love sent an email survey to all 2,387 tenure-track faculty in the top 20 ECE and CS departments (as ranked by U.S. News), and his 269 respondents were highly representative based on measurable characteristics. Here are some of his findings:

10 New IP Papers

For blog readers who aren't on Twitter, here are 10 recent IP papers that caught my eye.

John Golden: Is the USPTO Entitled to Chevron Deference?

This is a guest post by Ben Picozzi, a J.D. Candidate at Yale Law School.

Is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) entitled to Chevron deference? Does this matter? Many commentators believe that courts’ failure to grant Chevron deference to the PTO’s interpretations of substantive patent law renders it powerless as a policymaking institution. As previously discussed on this blog, Arti Rai and Melissa Wasserman have argued that the America Invents Act (AIA) changes this by granting adjudicatory or rulemaking authority to the PTO over substantive questions of patent law, including the standards of patentability, and consequently interpretive authority.

Top 31 IP scholars by h-index

Scholarometer is a citation-analysis tool developed by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington. It mines Google Scholar data to generate a scholar's h-index: the maximum number of articles h such that each has received at least h citations. (It also computes the h_s-index, which normalizes an h-index by the discipline average, which is 14.8 for law.)

Seaman: The case against federalizing trade secrecy

In his new article, The Case Against Federalizing Trade Secrecy, forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review, Chris Seaman does what the title suggests: he makes the case against federalizing trade secrecy protections and challenges the wisdom of current proposals in this direction. I'll quickly summarize the article and then make a few points. In general, I found the article highly educational and think Seaman makes a compelling case that federalization would be an unnecessary legal innovation.

Merges: An Essay on the Legacy of Chisum on Patents

Robert Merges originally wrote this essay, previously unpublished, on the thirtieth anniversary of Chisum on Patents: A Treatise on the Law of Patentability, Validity and Infringement (1978-present). Merges has generously provided Written Description with a copy. In the essay, Merges discusses the world of patent law scholarship in the 1970s and the significant effect Chisum's treatise had within the patent community.

Amy Kapczynski on the Future of "Beyond IP" Scholarship

I was thrilled to participate this past Sunday in the Innovation Law Beyond IP Conference at Yale Law School hosted by the Information Society Project (ISP). The list of attendees included Mark Lemley, Amy Kapczynski, Yochai Benkler, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, John Golden, Hannah Wiseman, Rebecca Eisenberg, Michael Abramowicz, Sean Pager, Jessica Silbey, Pam Samuelson, Barton Beebe, Ian Ayres, Brett Frischmann, Mark McKenna, Bryan Choi, Frank Pasquale, Tal Zarsky, Julie Cohen, Margot Kaminski, Michael Burstein, Bhaven Sampat, Brian Wright, Jonathan Masur, Dan Burk, Liza Vertinsky, Roger Ford, Sean O’Connor, Jim Bessen, Talha Syed, Arti Rai, Orly Lobel, Mario Biagioli, Rochelle Dreyfuss, Ann Bartow, Kiel Brennan-Marquez, Nicholson Price, David Grewal, and the ISP's own Jack Balkin.